Book Festival Social Media Campaign Seen 800,000 Times

The 2016 Derby Book Festival featured celebrities such as Ken Livingstone MP, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin author Louis de Berniѐres, Four Weddings and a Funeral actor Simon Callow, and broadcaster Stuart Maconie. We were approached to run a social media campaign across Twitter and Facebook to promote the Festival.

An Intelligent Social Media Campaign

Status Social ran a successful Facebook and Twitter campaign for the second year running, resulting in a significant boost to website traffic and hundreds of interactions from the public. We also tweeted live from some of the events and ran a low-budget Facebook advertising campaign to help sell tickets for Festival events.

Social media generated 12% of traffic to the Derby Book Festival website during the campaign, with only Google referring more clicks to the site. Ticket sales for the festival increased by 33% on the previous year.

“I would recommend anyone running an event to speak to Status Social.”

During the campaign, posts on the Facebook page were seen approximately 386,000 times. The page generated more than 5,500 interactions including likes, comments, and those all-important shares. Many of the posts on the page were aimed at generating engagement to take advantage of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.

Huge Gains on Twitter

The Derby Book Festival tweets and Twitter profile were seen more than 450,000 times, with people interacting with nearly every tweet published from the profile. Through posting highly-targeted material, we generated 1,673 retweets, 1,496 likes, and 972 link clicks.

By the close of the Festival, the Twitter account had 2066 followers – a huge rise from the start of the campaign.

Unprecedented Success

Derby Book Festival organiser Sian Hoyle said:

“The ticket sales for this year were beyond our wildest projections and were up by 33% on last year’s sales. We couldn’t have done it without the help of our marketing partners Status Social, Codemakers and WDA.

“Once again, Status Social demonstrated the impact a well-run social media campaign can have on a festival, helping create the buzz, brand awareness and positive effect on ticket sales.

“I would recommend anyone running an event to speak to Status Social.”

Find out how we can help promote your festival or event through social media! For a free consultation, call us on 01332 776 910, or fill in our online contact form.